What we have here is a common sense gap.
Fact: There are slightly more boys born than girls. Boys are more fragile medically, so in societies where there is poor health care the ratio at adulthood is basically 1 to 1. In societies like ours with better health care those “extra” boys survive, so there are slightly more adult men than women until late middle age, when men have more heart attacks, etc., and the ratio goes down.
So what are we doing wrong? Some possibilities
1. It’s pretty obvious that if boys start dating at 22 and girls at 19 there are always going to be two years’ worth of girls unmarried.
2. The consumer mentality has taken hold – “Only the best is good enough for my son” which is actually “Only the best is good enough for ME.” It also leads to an unrealistic feeling of entitlement on the part of the boy, which doesn’t help the marriage to work out.
3. The emphasis on money so that the boy – whatever his own talents and wishes – should continue learning indefinitely – is leading to a real inversion of our values.
4. While there are also girls going off the derech, most of those OTD in the early ’20s are boys, amking things even more imbalanced.
5. It’s possible that some single girls are staying single because they consciously (or more likely, unconsciously) don’t want to end up in the “Wonder-woman” syndrome trap – working, having a baby every two years, taking care of the house and putting together fabulous yon-tov menus, and going from one day to the next feeling exhausted, with no end in sight, while the husband either sits and learns or works at some unskilled job which is all he can get because he has no secular education.
While I don’t have any solutions that are workable in our current state of mind, I can make one prediction: as the generation of “older girls” continues to get older, we are going to have a new wave of dropouts – not boys who can’t fit into yeshiva but girls who aren’t allowed to fit into the “wife-mother” role because they haven’t been allowed to. Then, we will have some very bitter souls who rightfully blame us and transfer that blame to Torah life in general. And many, of course, will drop out quietly, perhaps (hopefully) eventually marrying those boys who dropped out ten years before.
Whatever happens, we’re in big trouble. The RYs at BMG and the other BH yeshivas need to do a din v’cheshbon on our social situation, and show some leadership. If the Gedolim after the war could virtually invent the modern yeshiva, surely their grandsons can invent the tikkunim needed to adapt it to the current situation of frumkeit in the US.